The Archive at Home: Jean Monro in Classic and Modern Interiors

Willa Handblock

Willa is shown here on the headboard of a grand bedroom at Firmdale Hotels. Taken from a nineteenth century document and printed on one hundred per cent slublinen using eighty six blocks and twenty two colours, it is a large scale hand block floral of great beauty. The soft, painterly colour graduation, achieved by layering one colour at a time, gives it a three dimensional depth that feels entirely at home in this confident in this Modern setting.

Classic Interiors

It is in classic interiors that Jean Monro will always sit most naturally. As designs rooted in a traditional English archive, they were, after all, conceived for rooms of exactly this character. Oleander and Cecilia Toile are two such designs, both drawn firmly from history, and both entirely at ease within a classic scheme. Yet their appeal need not stop there. Faithfully drawn and thoughtfully recoloured, they carry the same ease into a more modern interior.

Cecilia Toile continues to be one of the collection's most loved designs, a serene and unhurried toile of bucolic English scenes, printed on natural linen. Used generously, as curtains or as a full scheme, it brings the particular calm of a toile de jouy to a principal bedroom or drawing room, a design with nothing to prove and every reason not to.

Oleander

Oleander has a rather more romantic history. First spotted in a hotel bedroom, the late nineteenth-century original was subsequently traced back to the Jean Monro archive, where it had been recorded, somewhat erroneously, as Azalea. The design and scale remain faithful to that original document, though it has since been recoloured for today's interiors and is now printed on glazed linen rather than the original chintz. It is a fitting example of what the archive does best: preserving a design's integrity while allowing it, quietly and without fuss, to be rediscovered.